7.4. The art of speech: phonetic aspects
This book is laid out so as to unfold, little by little, the mysteries of our everyday experience in speaking and listening to people, from the scientific point of view. It is also designed to be helpful in instructing students how to acquire methods of self-improvement in phonetics.
As this is not a manual designed for a practical course in phonetics we can only outline the general principles and give a few tips about how to speak most effectively in a number of situations, from the phonetic point of view. We mean, first of all, voice control, or voice monitoring.
Today the most common situations are:
face-to-face interaction,
telephone conversation,
interview,
presentation (public speaking).
In face-to-face interaction, be it a friendly meeting or a party, one has to present oneself as a pleasant personality, reliable and trustworthy. (I am sure there are other personality traits we would like to project on our listeners but these are the first ones necessary to establish contact.)
Apart from the body language (a friendly smile, a firm handshake, a nod, a turn of the head, eye contact, personal space proxemics) there is very little you can do until you are spoken to (but that visual indexical information already takes care of more than 50 per cent of the impression you make). But you cannot escape greetings and other conversational formulas. It is amazing how cliched (intonationally) opening gambits and other social formulas are, and how reluctant our students are to practise them because they think they know what to say. I have witnessed that Russian girls fail to use them because they can't respond to the cultural code automatically. They just smile, which is good. They look friendly but dumb. Check yourself for the quick response to: (a) Hi there! (b) How are you ? (c) / like your hat. (d) Pleased to meet you. (e) Thank you very much.
Paradoxically, the word which is mispronounced most of the time is thank in " Thank you" because it was first learned at school or somewhere else and has not been corrected since. Intonationally, the low-falling pattern of "Hello" was just as persistent and rude.
When you are engaged in a conversation, speech etiquette prompts you turn-taking techniques and the level of loudness acceptable for the company you are in. Speaking loudly is away of attracting attention, keeping the floor, interrupting others. This can lead to serious misunderstanding: people accustomed to soft voices may misinterpret louder voices as being overbearing or vulgar; however, people accustomed to louder voices often judge softer-voiced speakers as cold, distant, unfriendly or mousy (Chaika 1994:96).
Telephone talks and interviews also have their own constraints on the level of loudness, tempo and patterns of intonation. The less familiar you are with the other party, the more formal, polite and clear-spoken you are supposed to be. Choose the standard pronunciation forms to be on the safe side and keep the back channel working, especially on the phone. Your self-presentation starts from your first "hello" on the phone and the job interview may never be reached if you fail in that.
In contrast to interpersonal communication, public speaking calls for the maximum of your volume which couldn't be dropped throughout the talk in a way Russian voices tend to go (the so-called "trailing" or "fading" effect which would be a sign of fatigue or boredom in English). The most common error of young people learning to speak in public is reading a prepared text with accelerating tempo. Timing is a great art: keeping pho-nation/pausation balance, slowing down before a new word or just the key words, after a rhetorical question, contrasting more relevant and less relevant information by switching the rate of delivery. And the total time given must be carefully and sparingly distributed between the talk proper and the question period.
The most important rule written in all the books on rhetoric says: vary your voice. And by voice they mean pitch, to begin with. Pitch and tempo variation are the key clues to making one's speech lively, expressive and interesting to the listeners. How does one do it? How can we avoid monotony by keeping the loudness level rather high?
Actors, especially singers, know the effect of occasional lowering the pitch without dropping the level of loudness. Because speech delivery is linear, the main principle is contrast to the previous element, like a thesis and an argument, a concept and its illustration. By contrasting them through the height of the voice the speaker avoids monotony.
Another classical principle of rhetoric is to structure the talk according to 'etos-logos-pathos' triad. The first part (Introduction) is used for establishing contact with the audience and gaining their trust. This is called 'etos' and here the tone of voice is less formal than the rest of the talk. It is a very important moment (I saw volumes of opening gambits, sayings and jokes specially compiled for speakers). The main part of the talk is called 'logos', and here the target is to tell the audience what was meant to tell most convincingly. How does one manage to sound confident and competent? It is by employing a resonant voice quality, wide pitch range, and a fair amount of high falling tones applied to the key words that gives the impression of dominance (plus loudness and tempo, see above). The final part is where the speaker calls the audience for action, it is termed 'pathos'. The emotional charge of the finale is the greatest. If the speaker shows personal interest and involvement, which is quite appropriate for moving the audience, this is the place for it. It is usually most carefully prepared, and must never be skipped; if time is short, the main part is the one to be abridged mercilessly.
To sum up: your voice carries much indexical information above the message you are trying to convey to your audience. This could be phonetically monitored through practice in reading with loudness, tempo, pitch and voice quality modulations and careful timing.